A story of Toronto on Charles St. E.

Look the other way, and 40 or so people are gathering on the steps of Sanctuary church. They’ve come for the church’s free Thursday evening meal and medical clinic; the crowd stretches into the neighbouring George Hislop park. There are three tents on a grass strip. Opposite them, smoke rises from a group of men using drugs by the door to the hotel’s coffee and barber shop. A few people sleep on benches and picnic tables. Under a dancefloor-inspired mirrored arch, installed during the park’s recently completed renovation, two women sort garbage bags of bottles and cans. 

All the while, the people who live in the new condo towers walk by. Briskly.

Talk to the remarkable people who run Sanctuary church and they will say they know the human cost of what is happening on this block — and across this city — better than anyone. They face it head-on as they live what they say is their calling from God: to welcome in the people no one else will. Over the past three decades, they have saved more lives and held more memorials than they can count.

They do what they can, but it’s never enough. Housing costs are spiking, and the deadly street drug crisis is unrelenting. Ambulances stop on this street frequently. Police and city outreach teams, too.

And now, more and more people on Charles Street East believe Sanctuary has become part of the problem. 

People who live nearby report being assaulted and harassed as they walk home. Hotel staff and city workers go through the park daily to clean up garbage, discarded drug paraphernalia and human feces. Nearby businesses say they are losing customers, struggling to find insurance providers and worrying about the safety of staff and patrons.

Last month, the condo residents next door to Sanctuary filed a $2.4-million lawsuit against the church. It accuses Sanctuary of being a magnet for violence, fires, thefts, garbage, drug dealing and open drug use, both on their own property and in the park next door. 

“They say to me, ‘We got here first,’” condo board president Peter McDonald told the Star. “That is not what a good neighbour would do. They are abusing the neighbourhood.”

McDonald has been condo board president since the 47-storey CASA tower opened 15 years ago. There were always security issues on Charles Street East but, in his view, Sanctuary makes them worse. The church is only open for limited hours, a few days a week. This means people who are homeless, and often who also drink or use drugs, hang out around the church at all hours of the day and night.

He would like to see Sanctuary hire its own security and install lighting and cameras. Or have the city put up a fence that would prevent people from gathering on the church’s front steps when the church isn’t open. Perhaps the park should be closed again. 

McDonald said he isn’t really concerned with what goes on inside the church — but handing out sleeping bags and safe drug use kits isn’t a solution. Pleas to the city, local politicians, police and to Sanctuary staff haven’t worked, he said. The condo has had to hire extra security and retained a lobbyist firm. The lawsuit, he said, is a last resort. 

“Everyone is just fed up,” he said. “What you’re doing right now doesn’t work.”

It wasn’t always like this.

Sanctuary started up in the early 1990s in what was then Central Gospel Hall, a dying church that was taken over by Greg Paul and other members of a Christian band. The vision was a church and a community where people who are poor and excluded are especially welcome, and no one person is above the other. A place to embody what Jesus taught.

In the 30 or so years since, the neighbourhood has changed around Sanctuary. The rental apartment buildings and rooming houses were demolished, along with a YMCA building and a Children’s Aid office. Now there are glass condo towers and a park that was once a parking lot. 

In 2025, only a small congregation attends the church’s Sunday evening service, hardly 20 people — about the same number as they have staff. But their community is much larger, executive director Gil Clelland said. Here, church lies in the meals they cook in the basement to eat together twice a week. It’s in the no-judgment clinic, which handles everything from pneumonia to prenatal care, and in the foot clinic for common street-life problems like trench-foot and frostbite. Church is the drop-in art sessions, where people paint technicolour flowers to calm their nerves, and the community concerts, where they dance and sing. It’s the outreach team that goes out to find the person who was discharged from the hospital late at night into the pouring rain, to make sure he’s OK. 

Most of all, it’s building relationships with people who have little trust to spare.

“We are not the best housing workers, we are not the best clinic, there are better places you can get medical care,” explained the church’s pastoral director Tanja Futter. “What Sanctuary wants to be is a place where, in the midst of the s-​-​- of life, you can come and you will be held, and cherished.”

Sanctuary is a place where people cheer when a community member gets housing — even though it has only happened because they have terminal cancer, with less than two years to live. What you see here can cause you to both lose your faith in God, and have it restored, often at the same time. 

Few people here are naive — they understand why their neighbours are unhappy.

Matthew Colley, 58, said he gets it because he remembers what he was like when he came to a meal at Sanctuary for the first time two decades ago. He’d been on a weeklong bender, strung out on drugs and alcohol. It didn’t matter. They let him wash dishes, and he kept coming back, eventually joining the kitchen staff using the skills he picked up in prison. He got sober along the way.

“People don’t stay close to here because there are dealers; it’s because if something goes wrong, this place will help them,” Colley said. Security guards would only drive away the people who really need to be here, he added.

Colley is finally healthy enough for a major surgery in a few weeks. A nurse from Sanctuary is going to take him there and pick him up after it is done.

Restaurateur Renda Abdo has known Charles Street East for as long as Sanctuary has been there. She opened 7 West Cafe in 1991, and, 10 years later, she and her business partner, Nadya Mancini, took over Wish restaurant at the intersection of Yonge Street, down the block from Sanctuary.

Most of the time, “we kind of lived harmoniously, believe it or not,” Mancini said. They got to know homeless people in the area and would offer out sandwiches. They left a water spigot outside Wish so that it could be used any time, by anyone. 

As Toronto shut down over COVID-19, the city’s shelters were deemed high-risk for the spread of the virus, so people spilled out of them and into tents around the city. Sanctuary staff tried to fill the gap in services, providing food, porta-potties, tents and sleeping bags, allowing people to camp on their property.

Mancini believes Sanctuary’s response to the pandemic brought more people to the area, including a tent encampment at George Hislop Park. After the encampment was cleared in July 2020, the park was fenced off for renovations until late last year. 

As Wish was trying to pivot to adapt to social distancing rules, Abdo and Mancini say they were assaulted and the restaurant was vandalized. They sold Wish in 2022.

Abdo isn’t part of the condo’s lawsuit, but she supports it.

“I’ve had 35 years right on that block and for me to be afraid going to work is very telling,” she said.

“We do have a crisis, but the Sanctuary is creating another crisis,” Mancini added. “It is killing the neighbourhood.”

The pandemic brought an even deadlier phase of the opioid crisis. In a short time, Sanctuary lost a huge part of its community in a generation of street elders who had a code of respect. When they could gather once again, the church held a memorial for 40 people.

“We are sort of starting from scratch in some ways, and how we do things here,” said staff member Sam Sundar-Singh. 

He wants the neighbourhood to understand that they don’t control the people who come to Sanctuary. “Like any community and family, it can get messy. It can get out of hand,” he said. “We care for each other. At the same time, everyone is responsible for themselves.”

Sanctuary is donor-funded and takes no money from the city, with whom it has skirmished in various ways over the years. The city has served it bylaw notices, while Sanctuary was among a group of organizations that sued the city in the early days of the pandemic to improve shelter conditions.

The church has tried different ways to help over the years, some effective, some not, Sanctuary co-founder Paul said. They own one house where four people still live, but a second location became too hard to manage. The people they wanted to house, with addictions and mental illnesses, needed the kind of supportive services a place like UHN’s Dunn house provides. Sanctuary isn’t able to offer that.

Asked why Sanctuary’s door can’t be open more often, Paul said the reality is that it is too expensive. 

“We don’t pretend our process is perfect,” he said in the cadence of a pastor. There are disagreements among staff over what it means to be welcoming, on how to handle difficult or violent people, on how to best protect their community from each other when needed. 

“Our city changes. We’re trying to respond to all of those things.”

By the time they first began living in a tent outside Sanctuary church in the spring of 2023, Ryan Hayashi and Rebecca Strung had lost everything they had over and over and over again. Except for each other and their rescue dog, Maddo.

Hayashi had a head injury and was having trouble breathing from the pneumonia that had taken hold of his lungs after their first damp, cold winter, mostly spent outside. A friend living in a tent by the church had seen this kind of illness before and knew how deadly it could be. It so happened that it was a Thursday night, when the church’s medical clinic was open.

Hayashi used to work in publishing and had a knack for repairing watches. Strung worked in labour relations for a union. They had been using drugs for most of their adult lives, but it was during the pandemic that things started to fall apart. Three of their parents died, Strung lost her well-paid job, and they were eventually evicted in November 2022. They have mostly lived on the streets since then, with brief stints indoors that have ended badly, including one where a woman attacked Hayashi and struck him in the head. Most shelters don’t work well for them — a combination of drug use, prior bad experiences and Maddo’s nerviness.

When Hayashi saw a doctor at Sanctuary’s medical clinic, he “told me that it was imperative that I go to emergency as soon as possible, and if I didn’t, in no uncertain terms … I would be dead by tomorrow.”

Instead of calling an ambulance, Sanctuary staffer Simon Beairsto drove Hayashi to the hospital and stayed with him until the early hours of the morning. Strung had to stay back with Maddo.

It’s clear how much it meant to Hayashi. “He stayed because I didn’t have anyone else,” he said. Beairsto described it differently. Staying is just part of what they do at Sanctuary.

Strung and Hayashi like to stay close to Sanctuary because it makes them feel safer. They know familiar faces, staff will check in on them, and help them get what they need to survive. Someone will watch their tent or their dog so they can do things like go replace their identification — part of the bureaucratic maze needed to get housing. (Hayashi is optimistic about this; with Sanctuary’s help in accessing the city’s housing supports, he thinks they’re somewhere around 20th on the waiting list.)

Still, they aren’t sure how long they will stay in the park. It is perpetually muddy, and they don’t want to get Sanctuary in more trouble. They say they’ve had glass bottles and even a can of tomatoes thrown at them from condo balconies, and another man was struck in the head by a wooden spoon.

“We get they are fed up. We are fed up, too,” Hayashi said. “Nobody here wants to sit out for another winter and figure out a way to stay dry and stay warm.” 

“Yeah, it’s violent,” Strung said of the park and surrounding area. “It’s violent on the streets, it’s not just here, it’s not just because of Sanctuary. It would be violent whether Sanctuary is here or not.”

Inside the church, the regular Thursday night dinner is beginning. As you walk into the basement, you pass a mural of the Disney characters Lilo and Stitch, beside their saying: “Ohana means family.”

Outreach worker Greg Cook tells the packed room that the condo next door is taking them to court.

“Fight it,” a woman yells. “They will lose, they will pay your legal costs.”

Cook says that if the lawsuit isn’t dropped, they will indeed fight it. They won’t stop what they do because some people are “inconvenienced by homelessness,” he says. 

There’s a buzz in the room. Some people are angry. A lawsuit won’t fix any of Charles Street East’s problems; it just means Sanctuary will have less money to help people.

“We all live in this city,” says the woman who yelled. “We have to find a way to live here together.”

A few tables away, a man is passed out in his plate of food. Staff check on him every few minutes to make sure he is still breathing. There were three overdoses over the course of the evening. 

As people file out at the end with leftovers in plastic containers, an ambulance is by the door.